Utah Valley's Amazing Race---1st Stage

To conclude our May updates, we ended the month participating in the 1st Utah Valley Amazing Race (held May 30-31). We participated with another couple, the Bronson family, and traveled from Alpine to Mona for 24 hours doing a variety of different events. The winning team won a trip to Cancun, Mexico. To forewarn you, this blog and the next might be long; however, I wanted to give a run down of everything we did and how it went.

It began around 4:00pm on Friday, May 30th, where our team met up at the Scera Shell Outdoor Theater to check in. Our team was called "The Glover Gang". During the check-in process we received T-shirts (to be worn throughout the event), a hat (from one of the sponsors), and an Amber Alert GPS system. The GPS system would be placed in our car and track how fast we were going throughout the race. I was designated the driver because of the least likely to speed, I guess.

Anyways, on to the actual race. Right before 5 o'clock four different people took everyone's clues and went and hide in the University Mall Food Court. When 5 o'clock hit, we raced to the mall in hunt for our clue master. Our clue master was hidden in the corner of the Food Court, but we found him fairly quickly. We decided from there to figure out all the clues on where we need to go and then actually go. Here is how the 1st stage of the race went (from 5:00pm-2:00am) and what we ended up doing at each clue location.

(1) Seven Peaks (Provo)- All four participants went down the 100' Free Fall slide

(2) Lindon's Utah Auto Sales - Drove a car to the Purple Turtle and Discovery Park and had someone take a picture of us in these locations

(3) Bajio (American Fork) - Ate a shrimp taco with beans/rice (as fast as possible)

(4) Hutchings Museum (Lehi) - Solved a bunch of clues found on the display cases with black lights and then talked with some weaponry men who gave us a dead cricket to eat

(5) Parade of Homes (Alpine) - Toured a newly built Parade of Homes and hunted for clue sheets hidden throughout the house

(6) The Music School (American Fork) - Each participant played a different instrument (Chris-guitar, Megan-piano, Erin - bongo, and Ryan - drums) and we played "Smoke on the Water"

(7) Cold Stone (in Spanish Fork) - We had to down a quart size ice container of Cake Batter w/ Chocolate Cookie Dough (the girls could handle this flavor a lot better than the guys)

(8) Bowling in Payson - We had to get a total of 360 points before leaving---luckily, it only took us one complete game

(9) Orem Owlz Stadium - Had to find a point card in the dark baseball stadium at UVU.
Unfortunately we didn't do this during the day when you could see better; however, we found 50 points (the lowest card of three) and took

(10) Trafalga (Orem) - had to win a certain number of arcade tickets with minimal amounts of tokens; Erin won us enough on the first try so we gave the rest to some kids and hurried to the next event

(11) Sundance (up the Canyon) - Erin rode up to the amphitheatre on a bike while the rest of us ran the trail where we ended up writing a limerick about the event

(12) Noah's Center (Pleasant Grove) - Played at this Rec Center wallyball against the volunteer helpers. We had to score 21 points before leaving

(13) BYU - We had to start at the WILK and then go run to the Bell Tower by the Marriott Center and the Maeser Building and take a picture of our group at each (the actual event was to ride tandem bikes to these two places and take a picture but they didn't have enough bikes for everyone)

(14) Finally, we went to downtown Provo and looked at the statues on Center Street to
decipher a word

We ended up finishing around 1:30 and headed back to the SCERA Shell to check in. It was quite an exhausting day; however, we only ended up giving up 100 points possible (50 points from the Orem Owlz Center for not finding another card in the dark and 50 points for not being able to play a game of pool at the Noah's Center). This put us tied with seven other people for 3rd. So, after the 1st leg of the race we were in the top ten of 31 teams. It was off to sleep in the car, or attempt to sleep in the car, for a few hours before arising for the next leg of the race. I'll post about that either later today or tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Belated Mother's Day Blog

Erin and I are trying to catch up with all the major events that happened during the month of May, and of course, I forgot to blog about our Mother's Day. So, here is a little bit of what happened Mother's Day Weekend.

My mom and her sister decided to come out to Utah and celebrate Mother's Day with their mom, or my grandma. As I guess tradition would have it, we all decided to sign up and run Race for the Cure in SLC (we ran this 5k last year for Mother's Day).

Here is how the race went. As a surprise to my mom, my older brother, Jason, flew out and ran in the race for Mother's Day as well. Jason, Erin and I had a little competition to see who could lower their time (by %) from last year the most. The competitive spirit was high, but Erin prevailed by beating out Jason by less than a second and killing me. We want to congratulate both of them for doing incredible. Jason was the first to finish for the family and Erin cut the most off her time. I guess my accomplishment would be running the whole race and not throwing up at the end (unlike last year). The winner (Erin) won a Jamba Juice from the loser (Ryan), which is overdue.

Anyways, back to my Mother's Day themed blog. It was great to have my mom out here for Mother's Day. We had a fun time celebrating at my grandma's house and enjoyed her company while during her short stay. By the way, we also got to taste some amazing Tucanos while she was out here. Very good!!!

As a conclusion to this entry, Erin and I wanted to send a tribute to both of our moms. We appreciate your dedication and righteous examples you set in raising both of us to who we are today. We love you both a lot and thank you for everything you have done and continue to do for us.

We love you Mom Dixon and Mom Glover!!!

The Garnica's Visit

Also about a month ago, the Garnica's came to town from Denver. We had a great time talking with Robin and Fred and even got to see them again a couple day's later at Grandpa Dixon's birthday shin-dig. Shawn now tolerates me which is a huge improvement. He even let me play cars with him.

Reese is now about what 3 months old and I was able to teach her how to walk while she was here....look at her go!

The Dixon Family Came to Town

If you read my siblings blogs, you'll realize that like most of our past posts, this blog is about a month behind normal time...so...a month ago, my older brother Bren, his wife Elise and their two kids Brenna and Eli came to visit from Ohio. It was great to see them. Ryan made some Penne Pasta, salad and rolls for dinner which were all very tasty.

We had increased our toy collection from just a horse name Glad to the horse, a pink pompom and a bunch of boxes inside each other (we thought those were just a decoration, but found they were actually a good toy too). Brenna is just full of personalities, and we got a somewhat honory one that day. She was just a little on the tired side. The funny thing was that when Ryan pulled out my big TV pillow and turned on the Care Bears movie (we get it free through Comcast's free movies), Brenna plopped down just feet from the TV and was glued to it. She watched the whole show, which ended right when they needed to leave and even shed a few tears at the end.
We came up with a pretty good idea...all the married siblings should ditch their kids with our parents in Washington and then go on vacation. I even talked to Mom and she said to just let her know when....just something to keep in mind. We loved having them visit. Here are the pictures of us all together:

The new job and more

I think what we just experienced was some blogger burnout. Really, at the end of the day, blogging is pretty much the last thing I want to do, so it doesn't happen.

I've decided I'm not quite sure how people do everything. I mean, I think I have a pretty simple life, and I still don't get to it. I get up at 6:15am, workout from 6:30am to 7:30, shower, get ready and leave for work at 8am. I get back from work around 6pm, talk to Ryan, make/eat/clean-up dinner (ryan helps with everything) and we're already up to 7 or 7:30. That leaves just 3 hours left in my day before I want to be asleep so I can get 8 hours of sleep. In those 3 hours, there is family and personal scripture study, FHE, Temple, VT, friends, TV, looking for deals online and just relaxing...so pretty much blogging doesn't happen very often...

So now since I have gotten to it today, I'll tell you about my new job. I started working at Omniture on May 5th. I'm a Technical Consultant in the Financial Services Vertical. I basically help clients actually decide what it important to track, design and deploy. I have been learning a TON...honestly, way more than I ever learned in school. From what I've seen so far, I think I really like it and will love it once I'm over the initial ginormous learning curve. Oh, I guess I should actually tell you what Omniture does as a company...it provide clients with software tools so they can optimize their online business.

Overall, life is going pretty well. We'll see what I think about it a week from now when I finally start the biking portion of training for the STP...oh...anyone know anything about road bikes?

Homemade Strawberrry Jam---YUM!!!!

After graduation, Erin had a week off before starting her new job and I had a couple of days off until I started the Spring semester of school. Since that week of break was such a long time ago, I don't remember exactly what we did each day. I'm going to talk about one of the highlights for us, though.

On Sunday, we went over to Erin's aunt & uncle's house (the Moss family) to celebrate Devin's return from his mission in Boston. It was great to see a lot of the family at once. While we were there, Aunt Celecta had made some homemade strawberry jam, which Erin and I haven't had in a long time. We decided we should make some during this upcoming free week. The picture below is Erin showing off her first jar of homemade strawberry jam.

Erin's Graduation!!!

The blog squad is back and ready for a weekly blog update everyday this week. From our last week's blog, we have finally made it back to Provo and just in time for the culminating academic experience for Erin, graduation!!!

Erin finished her academic career and was honored for it on April 25, 2008. She was presented with two degrees, or you might say empty diploma cases with physical degrees being mailed soon. Erin graduated with a Bachelor's and Master's in Information Systems.

We also had a fun time hanging out with Erin's Mom and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa Finley, and Logan at a restaurant in Payson. It was delicious!!! As a graduation gift, Erin received Boggle from the Parente's, so we played that as well with Erin's mom and dad. It has become quite the competitive game in our family. It seems like Erin and I continue to swap bragging rights each time we play.

Below are some fun pictures from graduation. Enjoy!!!!